ANCIENT HISTORY: RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS
Vol. 41–44 2011–2014
Transforming Sparta: New Approaches to the Study of Spartan Society
The Position of Attic Women in Democratic Athens
An Unforgotten Episode in the Life of Caesar
Women Historians of Ancient Greece and Rome
Imaginations of Ancient Rome in 19th Century Historical Novels
The Graves of Gallipoli: ‘Mad Franks’ in Charles Bean’s own Copy of The Anzac Book
Book Reviews
MACQUARIE ANCIENT HISTORY ASSOCIATION
ANCIENT HISTORY:
RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS
Vol. 41–44 2011–2014
MACQUARIE ANCIENT HISTORY ASSOCIATION ANCIENT HISTORY: RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS A publication of the Macquarie Ancient History Association Macquarie University
Editor: Dr J. Lea Beness Editorial Board: Dr Peter Brennan (University of Sydney), Associate Professor Tom Hillard (Macquarie University), Hugh Lindsay (University of Newcastle), Associate Professor Boyo Ockinga (Macquarie University), Associate Professor Iain Spence (University of New England)
Reviews Editor: Reviews Assistant Editorial Assistants: Dr C.E.V. Nixon Editor: Anne Irish Dr Peter Keegan Ann Nixon
All articles in this journal are peer reviewed.
Copyright 2011–2014, Published 2015 Macquarie Ancient History Association
Published by the Macquarie Ancient History Association Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University, NSW 2109
Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under copyright law, no part of this publication shall be reproduced by any process without written permission of the owners of the copyright. Request for such permission should be directed to the editor of the journal.
Ancient History: Resources for Teachers ISSN 1032 3686
CONTENTS
Stephen Hodkinson Transforming Sparta: New Approaches to 1 The Study of Spartan Society David M. Pritchard The Position of Attic Women in Democratic 43 Athens Doug Kelly An Unforgotten Episode in the Life of 66 Caesar Ian Plant Women Historians of Ancient Greece and 77 Rome Tom Stevenson Imaginations of Ancient Rome in 19th 93 Century Historical Novels Samuel N.C. Lieu The Graves Of Gallipoli: ‘Mad Franks’ in 127 Charles Bean’s own Copy of The Anzac Book
REVIEWS
Margaret Sampson Peter Charles Hoffer, Clio among the 147 Muses: Essays on History and the Humanities Alexander Toomey Edward M. Anson, Alexander the Great: 150 Westcott Themes and Issues Peter Keegan Alison E. and M.G.L. Cooley, Pompeii and 157 Herculaneum: a Sourcebook, 2nd ed.
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Notes on Contributors
Stephen Hodkinson is Professor of Ancient History and Director of the Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies at the University of Nottingham. In 2010 he was made an Honorary Citizen of modern Sparti for his contributions to Spartan history. David M. Pritchard is a Senior Lecturer in Greek History at the University of Queensland. In 2015 he is also a Research Fellow in Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Studies. Doug Kelly is a retired Senior Lecturer from the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the Australian National University. Ian Plant is a Senior Lecturer and currently the Head of Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University. Tom Stevenson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. Samuel N.C. Lieu is Inaugural Distinguished Professor of Ancient History at Macquarie University.
TRANSFORMING SPARTA: NEW APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF SPARTAN SOCIETY
Stephen Hodkinson The University of Nottingham
his article started life as a talk to the UK Joint Association of Classical TTeachers, Ancient History INSET day, at University College, London in September 2012. I am grateful to the editor for inviting me to update and adapt it for the use of teachers and students of Ancient History in New South Wales.1 My article focuses upon a number of topics central to the NSW Ancient History Stage 6 Syllabus Part II: ‘Ancient Societies’, Option I ‘Greece: Spartan society to the Battle of Leuctra 371 BC’. Some of the material on Spartan life may also be useful background for Part IV: ‘Historical Periods’, Option G ‘Greece: The development of the Greek world 800 – 500 BC’, section 2 ‘Athens and Sparta’ (which embraces the emergence and development of the polis in Sparta).
My article starts with the words ‘Transforming Sparta’; and its main purpose is to communicate and analyse a number of radical new approaches which have transformed academic understandings of Spartan society over the last generation. The article has three parts. Part 1 outlines how Spartan historical studies have developed since World War II and why they are currently in an exciting state of debate. It also discusses the academic and institutional context of the transformation of Spartan studies. Part 2 (the longest part) examines the details of the radical new understandings of classical Sparta mentioned above, focussing on new approaches to the ancient literary sources and on new insights into diverse aspects of Spartan society. Finally, in Part 3, I look at a further new and growing feature of Spartan studies which can enliven teaching and learning in the classroom: the study of modern receptions of Sparta and especially its role in 21st-century popular culture. I conclude with a few words about the recent graphic novel Three (2014), the product of collaboration between a comics author and an academic aimed at creating an authentic fictional representation of Spartan society.
1 It also gives me great pleasure to publish this article in a journal graced by many distinguished Australian ancient historians, in particular by the eminent Spartan expert Douglas Kelly, who contributed a myth-busting article on Sparta to one of the journal’s earliest issues (Kelly 1972/1982). A number of the radical ideas about the character of Spartiate daily life suggested in section 2.4 below have their origins in his revisionist article on Spartan policy-making in the Australian academic journal Antichthon (Kelly 1981), which greatly influenced my thinking as an early career scholar.
2 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches
The NSW HSC examiners regularly report that ‘Spartan Society’ is one of the most popular options within the Ancient History paper. That popularity and enthusiasm are fully matched within the 21st-century academy.
1. The transformation of Spartan studies since WWII The current state of Spartan studies is nicely summarised in Nigel Kennell’s recent book, Spartans: A New History (2010), which briefly incorporates many of the new approaches into its survey of Spartan history.
In recent years … the traditional view of Sparta has come under increasingly intense scrutiny as historians and archaeologists apply new techniques, perspectives, and even occasionally new pieces of evidence … As a result, the long-standing consensus over the fundamental nature of Spartan society has begun to crumble. In its place, intense debate has arisen over each and every facet of what we thought we knew about Sparta and the Spartans … In other words, Sparta is “hot.” But the ferment in Spartan scholarship has a downside. In no other area of ancient Greek history is there a greater gulf between the common conception of Sparta and what specialists believe and dispute (Kennell 2010, 2).
How has this intense and radical debate come to develop? The reasons go beyond individual scholarly choices and are rooted in 20th-century political history and in changes within the contemporary academy.
1.1 ‘Theme park’ images The story begins with the legacy of Sparta’s role during the Third Reich, when many Nazi leaders and ideologues appropriated Sparta as a charter for their educational, social and military policies, with the support of certain leading German classical scholars (Losemann 2012; Roche 2012; 2013, chs 8–9). In the generation after World War II, Sparta’s Nazi associations made it an uncomfortable, even a taboo, subject within Western European scholarship, transforming a previously flourishing field into an academic wasteland. Not until the late 1960s was there a partial revival of interest, primarily in Britain, where short books on Sparta were published by scholars such as A.H.M. Jones (1967) and W.G. Forrest (1968).
Despite this mini-revival, serious research on Sparta remained merely an occasional activity. Until the mid-1980s most books were one-off works by senior scholars who, having already made their reputations on other topics, briefly turned their attention to Sparta before moving on to pastures new. It is unsurprising that the depictions of Spartan society in such works were often Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 3 superficial and repeated a standard set of somewhat simplistic ‘theme park’ images. The quotations below give a couple of representative examples:
The famous discipline of the Spartans … is undoubtedly very ancient fundamentally and has close analogies with the customs of many primitive warrior tribes throughout the world (Jones 1967, 34).
… both Spartan and Kretan customs were inherited from their common tribal past … all these had been handed down through the generations as have similar institutions among the Masai in Kenya, the Zulus or the Red Indians (Forrest 1968, 53).
Note the warrior imagery, the picture of an unchanging society whose institutions were primitive survivals, and the overall impression of peculiarity, reinforced by comparative associations with ‘primitive warrior tribes’.
1.2 Seminal influences There were, however, two exceptional studies in this period which set new historical agendas and exercised a seminal influence on subsequent research. An article by Moses Finley (originally 1968, but subsequently much- republished) directly challenged the prevalent ‘theme park’ images. Finley argued that, far from primitive survivals, Sparta’s classical institutions were the product of radical change—what he called the “sixth-century revolution”—and that Spartan society continued to be marked by tensions, conflicts and changes. He also argued that few of Sparta’s institutions were in themselves unique: what was unique was their combination into a common way of life lived by all Spartiates. A substantial chapter in Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s book, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972, ch. IV), challenged standard images of Sparta less explicitly, but equally effectively, by providing the first close examination of Spartan policy-making and the formal and informal political relationships, such as patronage, which conditioned it. His account blew apart the simple stock images by showing the detailed and complex working of ‘real-life’ Sparta.
However, the impact of these one-off publications was far from immediate. It took the concerted work of Paul Cartledge from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s to make a significant difference. Cartledge was the first post-war ancient historian to make Sparta the central focus of his research, authoring three academic books (Cartledge 1979/2002; 1987; Cartledge & Spawforth 1989/2002) and around 20 articles, many of them collected in his Spartan Reflections (2001). His recent works of popular dissemination, such as his The Spartans: An Epic History (2002), rest largely on this earlier research. Cartledge’s work transformed Spartan studies by extending Ste. Croix’s close 4 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches study of Spartan politics to a range of social aspects, such as literacy, women, and pederasty, providing the first detailed and nuanced understanding of Spartan life. His use of anthropology critiqued notions of primitive survivals and Spartan conservatism: he fully embraced Finley’s “sixth-century revolution”. Nevertheless, his work held onto certain earlier views, primarily because of his emphasis on the overriding importance of the Spartiates’ exploitation of the helots and their consequent class struggle. For Cartledge, Sparta’s control over the helots was an exceptional and highly fragile form of domination, which compelled the Spartiates to regiment themselves into a uniquely state-controlled and military way of life. Hence in his work some of the earlier orthodoxies—especially the ideas of Spartan peculiarity and militarism—remained firmly in place.
1.3 Radical challenges I have highlighted the major legacy of Paul Cartledge’s research, partly because of its importance, but partly because the latest approaches frequently critique the orthodoxies he retained. My own research from the mid-1980s onwards has highlighted ways in which Sparta was less peculiar and exceptional than normally believed. My work in the 1980s and 1990s contended, for example, that the major developments in archaic and classical Sparta frequently paralleled similar developments elsewhere in ancient Greece, albeit often taken to their logical extreme (Hodkinson 1997a). I also argued that, despite the public character of the Spartiates’ common way of life, their system of landed property remained a normal Greek system of private ownership and inheritance (Hodkinson 1986; updated in 2000, ch. 3). For further details, see Section 2.2.3 below.
In recent years my research has moved towards more radical perspectives, concluding that Sparta’s public institutions and austere lifestyle in operation during the classical period were—on the long view—a temporary imposition upon a more enduring privately-oriented, wealth-based society. Already by the later fifth century Sparta was being transformed back into a plutocratic society, as she had previously been before the “sixth-century revolution” (2000, ch. 13). In similar vein, I have challenged the standard belief that a Spartiate’s everyday life was dominated by his public duties, primarily geared towards military training and war, arguing that Spartan citizens devoted equal, if not more, time and attention not only to their broader civic duties but also to their private affairs (Hodkinson 2006, 130–47; 2009, 448– 55).
Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 5
The other main radical challenges to traditional orthodoxies have come from the eminent French scholar, Jean Ducat. Mostly written in his native language, Ducat’s publications have not had the full impact among Anglophone audiences that they deserve. This particularly applies to his important monograph, Les Hilotes (1990). Rigorously exposing the misleading presuppositions of ancient writers, Ducat disputes many of the supposed certainties of Spartiate-helot relations, arguing that the helots were privately rather than publicly owned, albeit that there was a larger than normal degree of communal constraint over what individual Spartiate masters could do with their helots. In his view, this made the helots’ overall position typically more favourable than the ‘total exploitation’ of chattel slaves elsewhere in Greece, despite the occasional predations of the krypteia. Ducat’s Spartan Education (2006a)—happily published in English translation—applies a similar critical method to Sparta’s public upbringing, emphasising how, far from constituting the boys’ entire education, it covered mainly its physical aspects, running in parallel with private educational arrangements for the boys’ paideia similar to those in other Greek poleis.
Such radical new approaches, with their tendency to ‘normalise’ Sparta, have changed the face of Spartan studies; but we should not, of course, fall into the trap of assuming that ‘new approaches’ automatically mean ‘better approaches’. In his comments, quoted above, Kennell rightly refers to “what specialists believe and dispute”: some specialists still hold firm to older views. The lack of native Spartan sources often precludes certainty: hence the difference between newer and older interpretations is frequently one of competing plausibilities. Positively embracing the creative tension between current divergent views, my edited volume Sparta: Comparative Approaches includes a debate between myself and Mogens Hansen, former Director of the Copenhagen Polis Centre, for and against recent challenges to the orthodoxy that Sparta was an exceptional polis (Hodkinson ed. 2009, chs. 11–13). These fundamental disagreements between leading scholars make Sparta an especially exciting topic for engaging students in thought- provoking debate!
1.4 New research and publishing landscapes The other main influence that has altered the face of Spartan studies is significant changes in the landscape of academic research and publishing. This new landscape is the product of four main factors. First, as Sparta’s Nazi associations have faded with the passage of time, there has been a global resurgence of international Spartan scholarship, which started in the mid- 1980s and has continued to grow exponentially. From a low point of only six 6 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches books on Spartan history published throughout the entire world in the 1950s, there were around 20 books published in the 1990s and almost 40 in the 2000s.
Much of this resurgence has operated within the traditional model of the lone scholar pursuing his or her individual research. However, the second game- changer over the last generation has been the dramatic growth of collaborative interactions between scholars of different nationalities. Before the late 1980s there had been no major international scholarly gatherings on ancient Sparta. Since then there have been multiple conferences of the International Sparta Seminar, co-founded by Anton Powell and myself, which has now produced seven collective volumes.2 Bringing together cutting-edge research on Spartan history by almost 50 scholars from thirteen different countries, one notable feature is that they make available to Anglophone audiences the translated work of leading foreign academics who normally publish only in their own languages. There have also been a number of international conferences and collective publications in the field of Lakonian archaeology, several of them sponsored by the British School at Athens, which include important work by scholars from the Greek Archaeological Service and Greek universities.3
The third new factor has been the creation of two recent formal team collaborations, both at the University of Nottingham. One is my ongoing research project Sparta in Comparative Perspective: Ancient to Modern, funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (2004–10):
2 Powell ed. 1989; Powell and Hodkinson eds 1994; Hodkinson and Powell eds 1999; Powell and Hodkinson eds 2002; Figueira ed. 2004; Hodkinson and Powell eds 2006; Powell and Hodkinson eds 2010. 3 Sanders ed. 1992; Palagia and Coulson eds 1993; Cavanagh and Walker eds 1998; Cavanagh, Gallou and Georgiadis eds 2009. 4 Hodkinson ed. 2009; Hodkinson and Macgregor Morris eds 2012. For the project’s other publications, see
The final factor has been a greatly increased focus on Sparta within more traditional forms of academic publishing. Leading this trend has been the Classical Press of Wales (CPW), an independent press founded by Anton Powell in 1993. By publishing the edited volumes of the International Sparta Seminar and the Sparta in Comparative Perspective project, as well as several single-authored books on Spartan history and reception, the CPW has played a major role in underpinning the renaissance of Sparta as a major field of current research. In France, the ancient history journal Ktèma, co-founded in 1976 by another leading Sparta expert, Edmond Lévy, has published collections of articles on Spartan history in several of its issues.5
In sum, within the last generation Spartan studies have been transformed from an occasional activity by a handful of mainly British scholars to a global enterprise marked by co-ordinated international collaborations, a dedicated research centre and research project, and its own specialist publisher. This transformation and the intensive exchange of ideas between scholars from around the world, now powerfully facilitated by electronic communications, form the basis for the current exciting ferment in Spartan research.
2. Spartan society to the Battle of Leuctra 371 BC: New Approaches So what are the key new approaches relevant to the ‘Spartan Society’ option in the NSW HSC syllabus? My discussion will focus above all on Sparta in the Classical period, the fifth and early fourth centuries BC. I will structure my analysis around the following syllabus bullet points, drawn mostly from Section 2 ‘Social structure and political organisation’, but including
5 Ktèma 2 (1977); 12 (1987); 27 (2002); 30 (2005); 32 (2007); 38 (2013). 8 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches important elements from Section 3 ‘The economy’, Section 5 ‘Cultural life’ and Section 6 ‘Everyday life’.
Greek writers’ views of Sparta (section 5) Social structure: Spartiates, perioeci, ‘inferiors’, helots (section 2) – including land ownership (from section 3) Educational system: agoge (section 2) Daily life and leisure activities (section 6) – including the military and syssitia (from section 2) Role and status of women: land ownership, inheritance (section 2) – including marriage customs (from section 6)
2.1 Greek writers’ views of Sparta I start with the views of Greek writers because, given the limited surviving archaeological and epigraphical evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries, our understanding of Spartan society in this period rests primarily on how we interpret the literary texts. I shall mainly focus on the views of contemporary sources. Valuable though the evidence of later writers like Plutarch and Pausanias can sometimes be, the last generation of research has demonstrated that their evidence is frequently distorted by invented traditions originating in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, eras when Sparta’s institutions and practices no longer existed in their Classical form. In particular, we must resist the temptation to treat the most complete account of Spartan society— that in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus—as our most reliable guide to the realities of fifth- and fourth-century Spartiate life. On the surface, its account may appear a model of coherence and plausibility. However, where it can be compared with earlier sources, it frequently proves to be a misleading companion: most notoriously, on the subject of land tenure and inheritance. Although Plutarch was well-read in earlier writings, specialist studies of his working techniques have shown how he often actively adapted and altered his source material, sometimes reshaping its contents, sometimes transferring material to other contexts, sometimes simplifying complex information, sometimes adding made-up detail (Pelling 1980/2002). These comments certainly apply to his lives of Lysander and Agesilaos. Although Plutarch’s account is grounded in attested historical events, he selects which episodes to record and interprets their significance in accordance with his moral interpretation of Sparta’s decline (D.R. Shipley 1997).
A more authentic understanding of classical Sparta must be constructed primarily from the evidence of fifth- and fourth-century writers; but that itself is no simple task. In the absence of native Spartan sources, our contemporary Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 9 literary evidence comes exclusively from external commentators, most of them Athenians or writers like Herodotus influenced by Athenian perspectives, during a period when Athens had developed an assertive democratic regime and the two poleis were imperial rivals.
The resulting distortions were recognised over 80 years ago in François Ollier’s ground-breaking work Le Mirage Spartiate (1933–43). However, not until the 1990s did scholars begin to take full account of the implications of this mirage or to acknowledge that its character was more complex than normally thought. Traditionally, discussions of the Spartan mirage have focused on idealised accounts of Sparta produced by certain members of the Athenian elite, disgruntled by democracy’s erosion of their political power, who looked to Sparta as an alternative model. Recent research suggests, however, that this is a one-sided perspective (Hodkinson 2005).
First, no substantial surviving contemporary account indulges in unalloyed idealisation of Sparta. The works of the most clear-cut laconiser, Kritias, leader of the Thirty Tyrants, survive only in fragments. Moreover, writers like Plato and Xenophon, whom earlier scholars often classified as pro- Spartan, are nowadays viewed as equivocal in their approach. Of the four types of politeia outlined in Plato’s Republic, his Spartan-based timarchy lies closest to his ideal politeia; but it is described as a mixture of good and evil and includes several negative features such as contentiousness, love of money and a tendency to degenerate into oligarchy (547c–549b). In his Laws, although Sparta is regarded as a broadly well-governed polis, there is explicit criticism of several fundamental flaws (e.g. 628e–638b; 688a–c). In particular, Spartan education is criticised for producing men lacking the highest warlike virtues or true mastery over pleasures and women lacking a clear private or public role (548d–549b; 666d–667a; 806a; Patterson 2013). Plato’s method in the Laws, in which scattered critical comments on Spartan institutions contribute to his construction of an ideal politeia, is followed by Aristotle in Book 7 of his Politics. In Book 2, moreover, Aristotle adds a new approach, providing independent, systematic discussions of certain noteworthy theoretical and existing states, starting with Sparta, in which his recognition of certain laudable features is outweighed by his severe criticism of a number of fundamental flaws (Schütrumpf 1994).
As for Xenophon, his supposed idealisation of Spartan society in his Constitution of the Spartans—already questioned in certain older scholarship (Strauss 1939)—has come under renewed recent challenge. Several scholars have argued that, in addition to his well-known censure of contemporary Spartan practice in Chapter 14, there are implicit criticisms of fundamental 10 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches failings in Sparta’s politeia throughout the rest of the work (Proietti 1987, ch. IV; Humble 1999). Likewise, Xenophon’s Hellenika is nowadays widely viewed as presenting a sharp critique of Sparta’s attempts to create and maintain its early-fourth-century empire (Proietti 1987; Tuplin 1993). These challenges are part of a wider rehabilitation of Xenophon as an intelligent and even subtle interpreter of contemporary affairs (Dillery 1995; Tuplin ed. 2004; Harman 2009).
Secondly, the traditional focus on idealised accounts of Spartan society ignores a major opposite strand of Athenian thinking: hostile depictions rooted in Athens’ democratic ideology and imperial rivalry which portrayed Spartan and Athenian values as polar opposites, as in Perikles’ Funeral Oration (Thucydides 2.37–39). One recurring feature of these negative portrayals, explored by Ellen Millender in a number of studies, was the ‘barbarization of Sparta’: the negative association of Spartan institutions and practices with authoritarian and sexually-deviant Oriental customs, evident especially in the plays of Euripides, but also in parts of Herodotus’ Histories (Millender 1996; 1999; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; Poole 1994). Another was the creation of a distinctive Spartan ‘character type’—dilatory and over-cautious, prone to authoritarian behaviour and duplicity (thinking one thing while saying another)—articulated repeatedly in Thucydides’ work, as well as in several of Euripides’ plays (Hodkinson 1983, 265-78; Bradford 1994).
This is not to say that the fifth-century sources are unremittingly negative. In particular, Herodotus, though influenced by the Athenians’ barbarization of Sparta, distances himself from its alleged duplicitous character type and frequently portrays Spartan values and practices as emblematic of wider Greek customs. Thucydides subscribes to the image of Sparta’s long-standing constitutional stability (1.18) and the negative characterisation in Perikles’ Funeral Oration and other speeches should not be taken as reflecting Thucydides’ personal views. Moreover, Paula Debnar’s recent analysis of his accounts of speeches involving Spartans as speakers or audience has highlighted one notable encomium to Spartan values—King Archidamos’ speech to the Spartan assembly in 432 (cf. Thucydides 1.84)—and argued that “over the course of the history Spartans become more Athenian in their use of and receptiveness to more subtle speech” (Cartledge and Debnar 2006, 562, summarising Debnar 2001). Finally, Euripides’ consistently negative depictions of Sparta are partly counter-balanced by Aristophanes’ generally more sympathetic views (Harvey 1994).
Nevertheless, there remains an overall preponderance of critical over idealising viewpoints among surviving fifth-century writers; and the same is Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 11 true for the major fourth-century sources, given the searching critiques of Plato, Aristotle and (arguably) Xenophon. It was not until the Hellenistic period, following the decline of Sparta’s power, that a thoroughly idealised view of its society emerged, as its image changed from a political model whose qualities could be argued and debated to a moral model whose merits were regarded as indisputable by the various schools of Hellenistic philosophy.6
Awareness of the imbalance of critical over idealising accounts has proved crucial in recent reassessments of certain features of Spartan society which were viewed negatively in antiquity, especially its supposed militarism, the alleged license of its women, and its exploitation of the helots. These reassessments have also benefited from increased attention to ‘descriptive’ accounts of Spartan politics and society, especially the historical narratives provided by Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon’s Hellenika, which often derive from oral testimony from Spartiate informants or even from personal autopsy (Cartledge and Debnar 2006; Hodkinson 2007). In my discussions below I shall draw on two particular Xenophontic narratives: his accounts of the conspiracy of Kinadon c. 398 BC and the prosecution of Sphodrias in 378 BC (Hellenika 3.3.4–11; 5.4.20-33). Such narratives can rarely be taken at face value and require careful interpretation and reading between the lines. Nevertheless, as de Ste. Croix showed over 40 years ago (1972, 124–57) they can provide authentic insights into the everyday operation of Spartan society and institutions not provided by non-narrative sources. Their insights frequently show that the ‘reality’ of life in Sparta was more complex than one would believe from the generalised normative statements in the works of Plato, Aristotle or Xenophon’s Constitution or from the broad-brush characterisations of Spartan behaviour in the plays of Euripides or in Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ speeches and ‘editorial’ comments.
As one example of how a close and critical reading of the narrative evidence has produced genuine new insights, I would single out Jean Ducat’s study of the Spartan tresantes, or ‘tremblers’ (Ducat 2006b). Contrary to Xenophon’s assertion in his Constitution (ch. 9) that the Spartans operated a standard policy of punishing and ostracising all cowards, historical episodes when they were faced with cases of suspected cowardice—such as the men who surrendered on Sphakteria or the survivors at Leuktra—indicate that they frequently followed a more pragmatic policy of adjusting or even waiving the
6 Cf. the group of works known collectively as the Apophthegmata Lakōnika (Plutarch, Moralia 208B–242D). On the marked differences between critical Classical and idealising Hellenistic philosophical depictions of Spartan property and wealth, Hodkinson 2000, 21– 43. 12 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches imposition of sanctions, case by case, taking account of the wider consequences for the polis. In this instance, the Spartans’ actual policies and behaviour were more complex and flexible than the normative stereotypes would have us believe.
2.2 Social structure: Spartiates, perioeci, ‘inferiors’, helots In Xenophon’s account of the conspiracy of Kinadon mentioned above, an informer reports Kinadon’s comments about the list of groups he claimed would join the planned rebellion:
… helots and neodamōdeis and the hypomeiones and the perioikoi; for whenever a conversation started among these about the Spartiates, no-one was able to conceal the fact that he would gladly eat them raw (Hellenika 3.3.6).
This passage lists the five main groups within Spartan territory at the start of the fourth century: the unfree helots; the former helots freed for military service known as the neodamōdeis; the demoted former Spartiates called the hypomeiones (Inferiors); the free Lakedaimonians termed the perioikoi; and, finally, the elite ruling group, the Spartiates.
Whether the other four groups really were as full-bloodedly antagonistic to the Spartiates as Kinadon claimed is open to doubt, but the passage serves as a convenient introduction to this section, in which I will discuss recent research on the above groups in a similar, though slightly different, order from Xenophon’s list: moving from the helots (including the neodamōdeis) to the perioikoi, then looking at the Spartiates followed by the Inferiors.
2.2.1 The helots Among Sparta’s subaltern populations, the helots have attracted the lion’s share of recent research. Three historical studies stand out: Jean Ducat’s seminal monograph, Les Hilotes (1990), briefly described in section 1.3; Nino Luraghi’s The Ancient Messenians (2008); and the first-ever edited collection of essays on the helots, Nino Luraghi’s and Susan Alcock’s Helots and their Masters in Laconia and Messenia (2003). In addition, two intensive archaeological surveys within Spartan territory have shed significant new light on the character of helot settlement. These studies have led to major changes in current understandings of the helots.
One issue on which recent work has advocated a change of view is the helots’ status. The traditional view is that helots were owned by the Spartan polis, in contrast to chattel slaves in Athens and elsewhere, who were mostly owned Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 13 by private individuals. Recent research, however, has pointed out that this view is based on the evidence of later sources (Ducat 1990, 19–29; Hodkinson 2000, 113–16). Fifth- and fourth-century sources, in contrast, typically present the helots as privately owned, though subject to a large degree of communal sharing and intervention. (Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans 6.3 is a key text here.) The fact that the Spartiates as a community often treated the helots in collective terms—for example, in the ephors’ annual declaration of war or in mass liberations of helots (a phenomenon also attested in poleis with chattel slaves)—does not mean that individual helots were the collective property of the polis.
Scholars have long disagreed about how serious a threat the helots posed to the Spartiates and (not quite the same thing) to what extent the Spartiates perceived them as a threat. As already mentioned (section 1.2), one well- established view sees helotage as an exceptional and fragile form of domination whose maintenance forced the Spartiates to transform their own citizen society into a state-controlled and militarised system. But how exceptional was Sparta’s domination over the helots? In recent years several scholars have examined this question through the lens of comparative history, reaching a consensus that helotage was not that unusual. Hans van Wees (2003) argues that Sparta’s conquest of Messenia was just one of several archaic wars of conquest in which powerful Peloponnesian poleis reduced neighbouring farming populations to servitude. Nino Luraghi (2009) concludes that that the ‘peculiarity’ of helotage is more apparent than real and that it shared with chattel slavery all the elements which constituted a relation of domination. My own research (2003/2008), a cross-cultural comparison with modern systems of unfree agrarian labour—American plantation slavery, Russian serfdom, and slavery in pre-colonial Africa—has detected similar variables and factors at work across these diverse systems of exploitation. These insights suggest that there was nothing special about helotage that demanded the internal transformation of Spartan society, had that transformation not also been desirable in its own right to control well- attested conflicts among the Spartiates themselves (Hodkinson 1997a, 96–7).
As for the Spartiates’ own perceptions of the ‘helot threat’, the contemporary classical sources present strikingly different accounts (well analysed by Whitby 1994). Thucydides plays up the Spartiates’ fear, claiming that “Lakedaimonian policy towards the helots was always largely determined by considerations of security” (4.80.2).7 His claim, however, needs to be viewed
7 Thucydides’ statement is often over-translated as “Lakedaimonian policy was always largely determined by considerations of security towards the helots”, thereby expanding its 14 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches in its textual context. It follows his account of the Spartiates’ fear at one particular historical moment after the capture of Pylos and Kythera in 424 BC and it precedes his controversial account of their alleged massacre of 2,000 helots. (The arguments against and for the historicity of the massacre are well argued by Annalisa Paradiso and David Harvey in Figueira ed. 2004, 179– 217.) In contrast, Herodotus (6.75, 80; 7.229) and Xenophon’s Constitution (1.4; 6.3; 7.5) present the helots as just part of the scenery, undertaking a range of tasks for their masters in an apparently untroublesome way.
This is not to say that the Spartans did not take routine precautions: Kritias (fr. 37) mentions that when at home a Spartiate would remove the armband from the shield which his helot batman carried for him on campaign. But, that done, there is no evidence that he lived in constant fear. Xenophon’s account of the easily-suppressed conspiracy of Kinadon is instructive. Despite Kinadon’s claim about the deep-rooted antagonism of the helots and other groups, his own later comments reveal that the Spartiates themselves were so little concerned about their everyday security that, although heavily outnumbered, they went about their daily lives unarmed (Hellenika 3.3.7).
Here it is relevant to bring in important new insights from the two intensive archaeological surface surveys mentioned above: the Laconia Survey of an area in the lower foothills of Mt Parnon immediately east of Sparta (Cavanagh et al. 2002, 151–256); and the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project, which surveyed the most distant area of western Messenia, some 70 km from Sparta (Alcock et al. 2005, esp. 163–9). The most dramatic finding is the vastly different settlement patterns in these two regions. The Laconia Survey discovered as many as 87 Late Archaic and 46 Classical sites within its 70 km2 survey area. Most of these sites were very small, with a detectable sherd scatter of only 0.01–0.14 hectares: they were probably single farmsteads. In stark contrast, the Pylos Project discovered only five definite Archaic and four definite Classical sites in its 40 km2 survey area. Most of these sites were much larger than those in the Laconia Survey. The principal settlement had a sherd scatter of at least 18 ha in the Archaic period and 14 ha in the Classical period: it was apparently a sizeable village. Even the smaller sites had a sherd scatter between 0.24 and 0.75 ha. In sum, the inhabitants of the Laconia Survey area were scattered thinly across the landscape in a large number of tiny dispersed settlements; whereas in the Pylos area they lived concentrated in a smaller number of larger settlements.
scope from a specific comment on Spartan policy towards the helots to a wider comment about Spartan policy in general. It is hence sometimes over-interpreted as signifying that Spartan-helots relations were “the motor of Spartan history” (Cartledge 1987, 166; cf. Ste. Croix 1972, 92). Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 15
Who were these inhabitants? Those in the Pylos area are thought to be helots (Alcock et al. 2005, 156–8). The inhabitants of the Laconia Survey area in general could be either helots or perioikoi (Catling 2002, 228–38). However, at the least, it seems reasonably certain that the area’s westernmost sector, closest to Sparta, was land owned by Spartiates and hence cultivated by their helots. This sector shows a similar settlement pattern to the survey area as a whole: 13 of its 16 Late Archaic and nine of its ten Classical sites were small single, farmsteads with a maximum sherd scatter of 0.14 ha (Hodkinson 2003, 260 = 2008, 298). The significant differences between helot habitation in the two survey areas probably reflect the contrast between a region close to Sparta over which Spartiate masters could easily exercise close supervision and a distant region of Messenia where direct Spartiate supervision was intermittent, leaving the helots more scope to organise their own affairs and to live a more communal lifestyle based on residence in concentrated settlements.
What implications does this archaeological evidence have for the long- standing historical debates? It shows that Sparta’s exploitation of the helots was not uniform, thereby casting further doubt upon attempts to draw simple deductions from the nature of helotage to the character of Spartiate society. On the other hand, it might seem to support the idea that in Messenia the nature of helot life was conducive to the kind of self-organisation that could form a potential basis for revolt. However, the question is whether helot self- organisation extended beyond the level of individual settlements to co- ordination at a wider regional level, thereby facilitating helots in different parts of Messenia to unite in revolt.
For most of Sparta’s lengthy period of rule over Messenia, the answer to this question seems to be ‘no’. That answer is based on Nino Luraghi’s recent revisionist research on the development of Messenian identity (2008, 68–106, 132–45). Archaeological evidence suggests that the region possessed no major settlements at the time it was first conquered by Sparta. Indeed, during the late 8th century there was a widespread break in site occupation. It is therefore highly unlikely that at this early period there was any sense of regional identity, let alone regional unity. Stories in Pausanias and other late sources about large-scale Messenian wars against Sparta in the Archaic period reflect the ‘invention of tradition’ after 370 BC by the newly-created polis of Messene. The fighting against the Messenians apparently mentioned in a fragment of Tyrtaios (fr. 23) was probably a much smaller-scale conflict, since in his day the term ‘Messene’ referred not to the whole region, but only to the settlement at the foot of Mt Ithome and its immediate environs.
16 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches
Luraghi (2008, 182–208) has persuasively argued that a sense of pan- Messenian identity first became evident only during the major revolt of the late 460s and the lengthy secession of rebels to Mt Ithome, and that this new- found identity owed much to the involvement of the region’s perioikic inhabitants—see further section 2.2.2 below. The revolt’s significance for the evolution of Messenian identity is also highlighted by Thomas Figueira (1999). However, the rebels’ departure abroad at the end of the revolt seems to have restricted identity formation among the remaining inhabitants of the western region of Spartan territory. As Figueira shows, despite Athens’ settlement of the exiled rebels at Naupaktos and subsequent support for their noisy proclamation of their Messenian identity, Athenian writers never took the further step of applying that identity to the inhabitants left behind under Spartan rule. Likewise, Athens’ political leaders never fully exploited the potential for developing an internal Messenian identity, even after they installed the Naupaktian Messenians in Pylos following its capture in 425 BC (Thucydides 4.41). Subsequently, sizeable numbers of helots fled both to Pylos and to a parallel fort at Cape Malea in Lakedaimon (Thucydides 5.35.7; 7.26; Xenophon Hellenika 1.2.18)—though probably not as many as the 20,000 fugitive slaves following the Peloponnesians’ occupation of Dekeleia (Thucydides 7.27). These episodes provide no hint of any subaltern regional identity, let alone coordinated resistance. After Sparta’s recovery of the forts during the Ionian War and their expulsion of the Messenians from Naupaktos and Kephallenia in 401 (Diodorus 14.34.2–3), the issue of Messenian identity seems to have dropped off the political radar. The sources for the region’s eventual liberation in 370/369 portray it as “essentially a strike from without, supported by only the slightest local contribution” (Figueira 1999, 219) and focus largely on the returning exiles to the exclusion of the population in situ.
As for the Spartiates, it seems likely that the 460s revolt raised new fears about the helots not previously prominent in Spartan thinking. But whether these new fears led to increased repression, particularly the creation of the krypteia, as Plutarch claims (Lycurgus 28.6), cannot be determined from our evidence. The only definite new development in the late fifth century is Sparta’s recruitment of several thousand helots as hoplite soldiers from the late 420s onwards. This began with the one-off recruitment of 700 helots for Brasidas’ campaign in northern Greece in 424 BC and continued with the creation of the neodamōdeis, a permanent force of ex-helots given their freedom on enrolment. By the 390s the neodamōdeis numbered several thousand strong and formed a mainstay of Sparta’s overseas campaigns (Thucydides 5.34; Xenophon Hellenika 3.1.4, 4.2; Hodkinson 2000, 421–2). The willingness of so many helots to join up in return for their freedom should not be taken as evidence of contentment with Spartan rule. But it does Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 17 illustrate the complexities of the Spartan-helot relationship and the impossibility of reducing it to the simple narrative of a ‘helot threat’.
Instead, recent research is now paying more attention to the likelihood that any helot subversion was typically localised in character. A good example appears in Xenophon’s account of the conspiracy of Kinadon. The ephors trick Kinadon into leaving Sparta by pretending to send him to Aulon in northern Messenia to arrest certain named Aulonites and helots (Hellenika 3.3.8: note the apparent collaboration between helots and the local free population). Learning from work on modern slavery, ancient historians are also showing more appreciation of the probable importance of ‘everyday acts of resistance’: regular small acts of subversion through which slaves and other subaltern populations cause difficulties for their masters and gain some sense of personal agency. An attempt to imaginatively re-create helot everyday acts of resistance—such as removing their obligatory dogskin caps (cf. Myron of Priene fr. 2) when no Spartiates were around or recounting stories of past occasions of helot resistance—is one feature of Kieron Gillen’s recent graphic novel Three (2014) to be discussed in Part 3.
Finally, there is growing appreciation that Sparta’s long-lived control over the helots, especially in distant areas, would have been difficult without some degree of cooperation from the helots themselves—particularly from better- off helots whose more privileged position gave them reason to collaborate with their Spartiate masters. Helots could accumulate personal property (e.g. Thucydides 4.26 on helots insuring their boats and expecting rewards of silver). Moreover, my research has argued that the agricultural tribute which they supplied to the Spartiates operated on a 50/50 sharecropping basis (Hodkinson 2000, 125–31): hence successful helot farmers would retain a share of additional produce from the lands they worked. In the longer-term too, the helots’ position as a self-reproducing group with their own families suggests a population with a reasonably stable existence whose children would often continue to farm the same landholdings as their parents. In this situation, differential reproduction and mortality, along with diverse conditions of cultivation, would necessarily produce inequalities between helot lineages. There is a hint of such socio-economic differentiation in a gloss of Hesychios which refers to ‘leaders of the helots’, perhaps better-off helots who exercised leadership within their local communities and had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo (Hodkinson 2000, 119–25; 2003, 269–78 = 2008, 309–18). The Spartiates’ control over the helots was probably assisted by the helots themselves.
18 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches
2.2.2 The perioikoi Of the three main groups in Spartan society, the perioeci (or perioikoi)—the free but non-Spartiate populations living in polis communities scattered around the large territory of Lakonia and Messenia—are the least well attested in the literary sources. There are also very few perioikic inscriptions from their period under Spartan rule. Finally, archaeology so far has had little to add, partly because perioikic material culture is hard to distinguish from that of the Spartiates themselves, partly because the extant walls of most perioikic settlements date to after their independence from Sparta, partly because of the lack of excavations at perioikic sites or of intensive surveys in regions where the inhabitants were indisputably perioikoi.8 The first systematic excavation of a perioikic polis is currently underway through the University of Amsterdam’s work at ancient Geronthrai (modern Geraki). However, finds from the classical period seem modest: for example, its first historical fortification wall after prehistoric times was built only in the late Classical period, sometime after Leuktra, when Lakedaimon first became vulnerable to external invasion (Thorne and Prent 2009).
These are major gaps in our knowledge. Yet recent years have seen significant developments in our understanding of the position of the perioikoi and the nature of their communities, thanks to Graham Shipley’s systematic discussion of the scattered textual and archaeological evidence, allied to the international research project of the Copenhagen Polis Centre (G. Shipley 1997 & 2004; Hall 2000).
One new insight is that contemporary Greek writers regarded perioikic communities as poleis in each of the three key senses of that term: a town or urban area, a country or territory, and, finally, a state or political community. On the last point, the work of the CPC has shown that, in ancient Greek thinking, political autonomy (autonomia) was not a requirement for polis status. Throughout Greek history many poleis (for example, those within the Athenian Empire) belonged to a class of ‘dependent’ poleis, which were internally self-governing under the rule of another state. This was precisely the position of most perioikic communities, which must have had internal administrative structures to organise religious cult and festivals, arrange military training, meet Spartan levies and so on. Shipley’s work has identified at least 17 perioikic poleis in Lakonia and five in Messenia, most of them coastal communities.
8 As already noted, of the two intensive surveys within Spartan territory, the inhabitants of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project survey area in Messenia are thought to have been helots; the identity of the inhabitants of the Laconia Survey area is uncertain. Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 19
Recent research has highlighted other beneficial aspects of the position of the perioikoi. The ethnic term hoi Lakedaimonioi (‘the Lakedaimonians’)— which was also Sparta’s normal official designation in treaties such as the peace and alliance with Athens in 421 BC (Thuc. 5.18 & 23)—embraced both the Spartiates and the perioikoi. Scholars currently dispute whether there was such an entity as ‘the Lakedaimonian state’ (G. Shipley 1997; Ducat 2010); and, of course, political decision-making was monopolised by the Spartiates: it was they alone who could hold political offices in Sparta or attend the assembly. Nevertheless, their shared status as ‘Lakedaimonians’ betokened an authentic identity between Spartiates and perioikoi, stemming from their consciousness of forming a single ethnic group and sharing a common culture.
This shared identity and culture are most visible in the sphere of war. The perioikoi were the essential underpinning of Sparta’s military power. They contributed half the Lakedaimonian hoplite troops at the battle of Plataia (Herodotus 9.11, 28), and increasingly more over the following 100 or so years, as Spartiate citizen manpower continually declined. Of the 292 Lakedaimonian prisoners captured on Sphakteria in 425, only about 120, some 40%, were Spartiates (Thucydides 4.38). Perhaps the most revealing group of attested perioikic troops, however, are the ‘kaloi kagathoi among the perioikoi’, wealthy men of leisure, who volunteered for Sparta’s expedition to distant Olynthos in northern Greece in 381 BC (Xenophon Hellenika 5.3.8–9).
These wealthy volunteers exemplify the degree to which many leading perioikoi positively identified with their Spartiate leaders—an identification confirmed by the similarity of Spartiate and perioikic material culture mentioned above. Within the sphere of warfare, that similarity is illustrated by a number of modest inscribed stelai (24 survive in total), which are memorials to Lakedaimonian soldiers who had died in battle (Low 2006, 85– 91, with images on pp. 87–8). With minor exceptions, the inscriptions on these stelai contain only three words: a man’s name—without patronymic or ethnic—followed by the phrase ἐν πολέμῳ (‘in war’). There is nothing in any of these inscribed memorials to indicate whether the soldier commemorated was a Spartiate or a perioikos. Roughly half have been found in Sparta itself, half in regions inhabited by the perioikoi; and the obvious conclusion is that they were used by both Spartiate and perioikic families to commemorate their war dead in a simple, identical way.9
9 N.B. These inscriptions are not gravestones, but memorials to soldiers buried elsewhere, since in the archaic and classical periods fallen Lakedaimonian soldiers were invariably 20 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches
Although the prohibition on Spartiates undertaking money-making activities probably meant that crafts and trade were largely in their hands, recent scholarship suggests that the socio-economic structure of perioikic communities was otherwise largely similar to other Greek poleis, with most families gaining their subsistence or wealth from the land. The fact that at any given time several thousand perioikoi could afford the equipment to fight as hoplites—and a smaller number live a life of leisure—is an indication of broad levels of prosperity, possibly underpinned by being able to use helot labour as well as chattel slaves. This must help explain their normal loyalty to Spartan rule throughout the period down to Leuktra. Indeed, some prominent perioikoi held responsible official positions within Spartan war- and policy- making, acting as ship commanders and spies (Thucydides 8.6 & 22).
It is also likely that, spread around Sparta’s territory, perioikic communities formed a bulwark against potential helot trouble-making: further explaining how the Spartiates, resident in their home villages, maintained control over their large territory. The only time the helots mounted a successful revolt in our period, the Messenian revolt of the 460s, was with the help of the perioikic poleis of Thouria and Aithaia (Thucydides 1.101). Indeed, Nino Luraghi has argued that the revolt was not only supported but actively led by these perioikic communities and that the perioikic rebels played a prominent role in the development of Messenian identity, both during the revolt and subsequently at Naupaktos. This would explain why after the region’s liberation in 370 most Messenian cults retained many Spartan characteristics, reflecting the common culture that the region’s perioikoi had long shared with the Spartiates (Luraghi 2002; 2008, 198–208 & 230–9).
2.2.3 The Spartiates (landownership: agriculture, klēroi) In the preceding sections I have discussed a range of topics on which recent scholarship has transformed understandings of the helots and perioikoi. In contrast, in this section on the Spartiates, I will focus primarily on the specific topics of social structure and landownership, leaving other aspects of Spartiate society to later sections.
The Spartiates (full Spartan citizens) called themselves homoioi, a term often translated as ‘Equals’, but better rendered as ‘Similars’ or ‘Peers’. In what ways were the Spartiates ‘Similars’? They shared the same political rights of
buried abroad on or near the field of battle or (failing that) in neighbouring friendly territory (Low 2006, 91–101). This is confirmed by one inscription that bears some additional text indicating that the soldier in question died at Mantinea (possibly in the famous battle of 418). The inscription itself, however, was found at perioikic Geronthrai. Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 21 participation in the citizen assembly and eligibility to hold office. They shared a common way of life, including participation in the public upbringing, the hoplite army and a common mess (syssition). Finally, in line with the requirement to contribute a fixed monthly quantity of foodstuffs to one’s syssition, all Spartiates owned landholdings worked by helot farmers of a size (initially, at least) sufficient to produce that contribution.
It has long been recognised that within these broad similarities there were some significant entrenched inequalities. In the political sphere, for example, election to the Gerousia was in practice dynasteutikē, monopolised by a narrow range of lineages (Aristotle, Politics V, 1306a18–19). However, until the last 30 years, the standard view was that landownership was organised in a distinctively egalitarian fashion with a strong degree of public control. According to Plutarch, following an early redistribution of land by the lawgiver Lycurgus, each Spartiate owned an equal plot of land (klēros), either allocated to him at birth or inherited from his father, which he had no right to divide or to alienate through sale, gift or bequest. This condition of landed equality supposedly persisted until the early fourth century, when an ephor named Epitadeus introduced a law allowing citizens to give or bequeath their land to anyone they wished, thereby enabling influential Spartiates to acquire other men’s estates and impoverish ordinary citizens (Plutarch, Lycurgus 8.1–2, 16.1; Agis 5.2–3).
This view is still found in some textbooks, but a succession of studies by Douglas Kelly, Jean Ducat and myself (Kelly 1972, 11–14 = 1982, 14–16; Ducat 1983; Hodkinson 1986, later updated in Hodkinson 2000, ch. 3) has produced a decisive change of academic opinion. Most specialists now believe that Spartiate landownership was similar to the systems of private property in other Greek poleis. There was no ‘Lycurgan’ redistribution of land, no equal klēroi, no system of public control. Land was privately owned and divided among one’s children (or other residual heirs); but the owner could also alienate his estate by lifetime gift or testamentary bequest, though not by sale. Literary texts throughout the archaic and classical periods indicate that this private landownership was always highly unequal. The notions of a Lycurgan redistribution of land and of a rhetra of Epitadeus which allegedly undermined the equality of landholding were both invented traditions created in the late third century BC in support of the revolutionary reforms of Kings Agis IV and Kleomenes III, who claimed to be restoring the original Lycurgan equality. Buckley (2010, 72–7) provides an excellent brief exposition of both older and newer views, along with discussion of the key sources.
22 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches
One advantage of the newer view of Spartiate landownership is that it makes better sense of a range of other evidence about their social structure and behaviour to which recent scholarship has drawn attention. It ties in with numerous references to the importance of wealth and of wealthy citizens from the poet Alkaios (fr. 360: c. 600 BC) onwards. It matches the archaeological evidence for costly Spartiate private dedications at Spartan and foreign sanctuaries (Hodkinson 2000, ch. 9). It explains the literary evidence for the far-flung guest-friendships (xeniai) that leading Spartiates maintained with other wealthy Greeks and with barbarian princes and satraps (ibid., ch. 11).
Above all, it explains the epigraphic and literary evidence for successful Spartiate participation from the 540s onwards in the expensive sport of chariot-racing: an activity requiring extensive private landholdings for grazing and for growing high-protein fodder crops to feed top-quality teams of chariot horses (ibid., ch. 10). The longest surviving classical Spartan inscription (dating to shortly before or after the Peloponnesian War) is a stēlē dedicated on the Spartan acropolis as a thank-offering to the goddess Athena. Beneath a shallow relief depicting a four-horse chariot in motion, a certain Damonon proclaims an impressive series of 43 chariot-race and 21 horse-race victories, along with 21 athletic victories, won by himself and his son at nine different religious festivals in Lakonia and Messenia. Damonon boasts several times that his chariot-race victories were won “with colts bred from his own mares and his own stallion” (Hodkinson 2000, ch. 10, with image on p. 304).
Even more impressive is the evidence for Spartiate chariot-racing abroad. Between 448 and 420 BC wealthy Spartiates achieved a near-monopoly of the four-horse chariot race at the Olympic Games, winning the event at seven of the eight Olympiads in these years. To celebrate their victories, Spartiate victors commissioned expensive bronze personal statues made by leading foreign sculptors—in fourth-century Athens a life-size bronze statue cost some 3,000 drachmas, or half a talent—which they dedicated in the sanctuary at Olympia. These magnificent victory monuments still retained a prominent place in the sanctuary over 500 years later, when they were described by Pausanias in his Description of Greece (6.1.7–2.1). These impressive expenditures by wealthy Spartiates had a less attractive flip side. They were sustainable only through a continual increase in the size of their landholdings at the expense of less wealthy fellow citizens. Aristotle’s Politics (V, 1307a34–6) cites Sparta, “where properties keep coming into the hands of a few”, as a prime example of an oligarchic constitution in which “the notables are particularly grasping”. The result, as he says elsewhere, was Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 23 that “some have come to possess far too much, others very little indeed: hence the land has fallen into the hands of a few” (Politics II, 1270a16–18).
One important outcome was a dramatic drop in the number of Spartiate citizens during the fifth and early fourth centuries. In 480 BC there were said to be 8,000 Spartiates (Herodotus 7.234); but, according to Aristotle (II, 1270a29–31: probably referring to the period shortly after Leuktra in 371 BC), this number had dropped to under 1,000. As he goes on to claim, Sparta “was destroyed by oliganthrōpia (fewness of men)” (33–4). Aristotle himself supplies the link between the impoverishment of many citizens and the fall in Spartiate numbers: those who were too poor to contribute their syssitia dues were excluded from citizenship (II, 1271a26–36).
2.2.4 The Inferiors (hypomeiones) This socio-economic explanation for the sharp decline in citizen numbers implies the existence of a significant number of demoted Spartiates no longer of full citizen status. To men excluded through impoverishment, we should also add a smaller number of men demoted for other reasons such as failure to complete the upbringing or punishment for misconduct; also the sons of men convicted and sent into exile.
What can we say about these demoted Spartiates and their position? As we have seen, Kinadon’s list of potential rebels includes a group called the hypomeiones (‘Inferiors’). The text does not specify who these Inferiors were, but scholars have reasonably deduced that they were the demoted former Spartiates and their descendants. Indeed, it is probable that Kinadon himself was one of their number, based on his reported reason for his conspiracy: “to be inferior to no-one in Lakedaimon” (Xenophon Hellenika 3.3.11). The episode indicates that, although excluded from the syssitia, Inferiors continued to play significant roles: Kinadon is revealed as undertaking official police duties and, along with other potential conspirators, as still fighting in the army (7–9). Likewise, given the private character of Spartiate landownership, Inferiors probably retained their landed estates and their helot workforce.
How numerous were the Inferiors? John Lazenby (1985, 16–19) has argued that they were so numerous that they, not the perioikoi, provided the bulk of the non-Spartiate troops in the Lakedaimonian army. However, this view has not found favour with other historians. This is partly because of the clear evidence for Sparta’s use of perioikic troops, partly because it is unlikely that the number of Inferiors increased in proportion to the number of Spartiate 24 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches families losing full citizen status (Hodkinson 2009, 434–6). One reason is that the polis occasionally reduced the number of Inferiors by sending them abroad as colonists: for example, to its newly-founded colony of Herakleia Trachinia in 426 (Thucydides 3.92) and when Sparta was invited to send settlers to the Thracian Chersonese in 398 (Xenophon Hellenika 3.2.8 with 4.8.5). A second, more structural, reason is that most Inferiors would have had difficulties reproducing themselves demographically. Even without a legal prohibition on their intermarriage, few full-status Spartiate families would have countenanced marriage with a spouse of Inferior status. Compelled to marry spouses from similar straitened circumstances, Inferior couples probably had to practise strategies of family limitation in order to provide their families’ subsistence or attempt to re-build their landholdings to give them or their descendants a chance of regaining Spartiate status.
Recent research (Hodkinson 1997b, summarised in Hodkinson 2000, 355–6) has shed light on an alternative way in which Spartiate status could be regained. Phylarchos (fr. 43, quoted by Athenaios, Deipnosophistai 271e–f) and Aelian (Varia Historia 12.43) mention a group of boys known as mothakes. These mothakes were free, though not of citizen status, but they could acquire Spartiate citizenship after going through the public upbringing as the sponsored foster-brothers of the sons of wealthy families. Precisely who the mothakes were has been the subject of considerable debate. The traditional view is they were a ‘catch-all’ group, embracing youths of various backgrounds, including sons of foreigners, perioikoi and even helots. In contrast, the latest research argues that they comprised solely the sons of Inferior, former Spartiate, families. This ties in with the fact that three well- known Spartiate commanders from the latter phases of the Peloponnesian war—Kallikratidas, Gylippos and Lysander—are said to have been mothakes in their youth. We know nothing about Kallikratidas’ background; but Gylippos, who commanded Syracuse’s land forces against the Athenian expedition, was the son of an exile condemned to death for treason (Plutarch, Perikles 22.2; cf. Thucydides 6.104) and Lysander was raised in poverty (Plutarch, Lysander 2.1). Since Lysander later became the lover of Agesilaos, younger son of the Eurypontid king Archidamos II, it has been suggested that he was sponsored through the upbringing by an associate of the Eurypontid royal house (Cartledge 1987, 28–9). As adults, Gylippos and Lysander established an independent position through their military achievements; but many ordinary mothakes probably remained indebted to their sponsor households, living their citizen lives as clients of their wealthy foster- brothers, perhaps still relying on their economic help to provide their syssitia contributions and maintain their Spartiate status.
Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 25
2.3 Educational system: agoge The revelation that an unknown number of boys within the public upbringing were the sons of Inferiors, present not through right, but only as side-kicks to sons of the wealthy, is symbolic of the ways that recent research has revolutionised ideas of Sparta’s educational system. This revolution is due to two main studies: Nigel Kennell’s The Gymnasium of Virtue (1995) and Jean Ducat’s Spartan Education (2006a).
The most basic aspect of this revolution is the demonstration that the standard modern term for the education, agōgē, is a misnomer (Kennell 1995, 113–14; Ducat 2006a, 69–71). The term is never applied by any ancient source to Sparta’s public education. Indeed, it was not a local Spartan term, but a common Greek word. It does not appear in any source in a specifically Spartan context until c. 240–230 BC, after which it signifies the overall ‘discipline’ of Spartiate life, of which education was just a part. The consistent ancient term for the education itself before the Roman period is simply the general Greek term paideia.
The continuing existence of a public education in the Roman period leads us to one major change of perspective in recent work: concerning the extent of the educational system’s continuity over time and the implications for our use of sources (Kennell 1995, ch. 1; Ducat 2006a, ix–xvii). In reconstructing the system in the Classical period, older scholarship tended to combine the evidence of sources of diverse periods, as if they were describing an unchanging phenomenon. Analyses were generally based around the fullest account, that in Plutarch’s Lycurgus. In contrast, recent work has drawn attention to two points of discontinuity: the reforms undertaken by King Kleomenes III in the 220s BC; and the enforced dissolution of the public education by the Achaean League in 189/8 followed by its restoration and reorganisation sometime later that century. Kennell and Ducat disagree about the extent of discontinuity produced by these changes. However, they agree that overall the Roman educational system was sufficiently different from the Classical public upbringing that reconstruction of the latter must rest primarily on the contemporary evidence of Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans (chs 2–4); and that Plutarch’s account, which incorporates material relating to the Roman system, should be used only as supplementary evidence and with some caution.
Allied to this, there has been a trend to ‘normalise’ the Spartiate upbringing, to argue that its distinctive characteristics represented variants of wider Greek practices. Sparta had the only compulsory public system of boys’ education in the Classical period; but Xenophon’s claims about its uniqueness are 26 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches somewhat overdone. For example, its commencement at age 7 and its division into three general stages—the paides (age 7–c.13), paidiskoi (age c.14–19) and hēbōntes (age 20–29)—parallels the less formalised stages of boyhood, youth and young manhood in other poleis.
Most importantly, the public physical education, on which ancient writers focus all their attention, formed only part of a Spartiate’s upbringing: “the most sensational part, certainly … but not necessarily the most important” (Ducat 2006a, 333). In the pre-teenage years there was also what Ducat calls “the hidden face of Spartan education” (ibid. 119): a normal Greek training in reading and writing,10 oral expression, and choral singing and dancing (cf. Plutarch, Lycurgus 19–21), probably taught by teachers privately paid by Spartiate families. Then from age 12 there followed a youth’s relationship with his male lover (erastēs): a personal form of socialisation, broadly supervised by the polis, but instigated through private initiative and influenced by family and friends (Link 2009). An excellent example appears in Xenophon’s account of the prosecution of Sphodrias in 378 BC, in which he depicts the relationship between Sphodrias’ son Kleonymos and the latter’s lover Archidamos: a relationship involving intense emotional engagement and the supportive context of friends, set against the background of family and political manipulation (Hellenika 5.4.25–33; Hodkinson 2007). Overall, Spartiate education was not simply a public matter, but the product of both public structures and private inputs working in parallel (Kennell 1995, ch. 6; Ducat 2006a, chs 4–5).
2.4 Daily life and leisure activities (including the military and syssitia) For this part of my article I switch to Section 6 of the syllabus on ‘Everyday life’, but incorporating two topics from Section 2—the military and the syssitia—which the NSW HSC syllabus places under the bullet point ‘control of the helots’.
There are three reasons for separating these topics from the ‘helot control’ bullet point. One is the important shift of perspective already noted during my discussion of the helots, perioikoi and Inferiors. As we have seen, recent research has not only challenged the traditional view that the helots were a constant major security threat. It has also argued that much of the everyday control of the helot population was achieved quietly through the cooperation of members of the non-Spartiate populations: privileged helots, the perioikic
10 Recent studies (e.g. Millender 2001) suggest that the Spartiates were more literate than previously supposed. Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 27 communities, and special agents like Kinadon drawn from the Inferiors. Hence there is no reason to believe that Sparta’s citizen institutions were dictated primarily by the needs of helot control. Only on the rare occasions of helot revolt was the army required as the ultimate guarantor of Spartiate security. Although one element of the syssitia was forcing helots to drink strong wine and engage in ridiculous songs and dances (Plutarch Lycurgus 28.4), that exercise was less about helot control than about symbolic distancing and about warning young Spartiates of the effects of drunkenness.
Recent research suggests that even the killing of helots during the infamous krypteia, about which the sources give contradictory accounts, was no more than a symbolic measure of helot control (Ducat 2006a, ch 9). Sent out on a merely occasional basis, barefoot with only daggers, without specific instructions and hiding themselves from others’ view with no opportunity for reporting back, the kryptoi were hardly a serious means of policing the helots. The fact that the krypteia involved only a select minority of young men (Plutarch, Lycurgus 28.2, citing Aristotle fr. 538 Rose), for whom it formed an intensive period of personal trials, probably as part of the selection process for Sparta’s future leaders, suggests that its civic function was equally if not more important. It is hardly surprising that the killing of helots makes no appearance in Plato’s description of the krypteia in the Laws (633b–c).
A second reason for considering the army and syssitia under the heading of everyday life is that, as with the education system, recent work has highlighted that these public institutions included significant room for private initiative (Hodkinson 2009, 447–8). Membership of a syssition was compulsory, on pain of loss of citizenship. Yet each individual syssition, containing about 15 members (Plutarch Lycurgus 12.2), was largely self- regulating and its operation lay outside the control of polis officials. The election of new members was decided by its existing messmates. Its conversations were immune from outside scrutiny: on entering, members were reminded, “Not a word goes out through these [doors]” (Plutarch, Lycurgus 12). Individual messmates could voluntarily donate additional foodstuffs from the hunt or their private estates (Xenophon, Constitution 5). Moreover, each messmate’s continuing participation rested on his private economic capacity to provide the required food contributions.
The self-regulating character of the messes also produced a degree of self- regulation in the organisation of the army, since the messmates in each syssition fought together in the smallest army unit, the enōmotia, containing some thirty-odd men. Consequently, the recruitment of young Spartiates to particular army units was determined, not by the polis or its generals, but by 28 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches ordinary citizens, as the members of different syssitia elected new messmates from among the rising 20-year-olds. As Douglas Kelly (1981, 36) has shown, a similar dispersal of responsibility extended to military decision-making. A king would normally consult widely among his subordinate officers, right down to the pentēkontēres, three levels below (Xenophon, Constitution 13.4; Hellenika 3.5.22; 4.5.7). Spontaneous rank-and-file initiatives could even modify a commander’s decisions, as ordinary soldiers shouted out alternative tactics which their commanders quickly implemented (e.g. Thucydides 5.65; Xenophon, Hellenika 4.2.22; cf. 7.4.24–5).
The third reason for considering the army and syssitia under ‘everyday life’ is that the 15 or so members in each syssition and the 30-odd members in each enōmotia form good examples of the kind of modest-sized groups which were the most common locus of Spartiate daily life. Despite occasional mass gatherings, such as in the assembly or at festivals, most everyday Spartiate activities took place in much smaller gatherings, such as the activities mentioned by Xenophon (Constitution 9.4-5) at which cowards were excluded or given lowly positions: the mess, the gymnasion, ballgames, and the chorus. We can also add other small-group activities, such as hunting parties and specialised religious cults such as the cult of Talthybiadai, the hereditary guild of heralds. The above list is far from exhaustive, but it is sufficient to show that a Spartiate’s everyday life was highly diverse, as he participated in a multiplicity of different public and private modest-sized groupings. Some involved overlapping personnel; but others involved a diverse and changing group of persons. For example, one’s fellow messmates, ranging from callow youths to age-wizened elders, differed greatly from one’s fellow chorus members, men of one’s own generation.
Sparta has often been viewed as a totalitarian society in which the polis controlled every aspect of its citizens’ lives.11 According to Plutarch (Lycurgus 24.1), “no man was allowed to live as he pleased, but in their polis, as in a military camp, they had a prescribed lifestyle and employment in public service”. This statement may be partially true in that evening attendance at one’s syssition was compulsory except if delayed by sacrifice or the hunt. Yet, as we have already seen, the atmosphere at the syssitia was far from authoritarian: in Kelly’s words, they “produced clubbable men, nor lackeys” (1981, 57). Furthermore, no contemporary source hints that earlier parts of a Spartiate’s day were so closely prescribed. Xenophon’s Constitution mentions sessions in the gymnasium and encouragement to
11 In modern times this view has been powerfully influenced by Sparta’s association with 20th- century totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (see Part 3 below). Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 29 participate in hunting on foot to keep fit for war (4.7; 5.8), but it is unclear whether these were daily requirements. The gymnasium sessions were supervised by the senior man present; but the organisation of hunting parties was a much more informal affair: in Xenophon’s words, “those in need [of hunting-dogs] invite [their owner] to the hunt, and if he himself is otherwise engaged, he is glad to send them” (6.3). As with the syssitia and the army, hunting involved a large degree of self-organisation by ordinary citizens themselves. Poorer citizens could only hunt if they could borrow dogs from a wealthier Spartiate, and the latter could opt out personally if it clashed with other commitments.
This picture of a relatively non-prescriptive daily lifestyle comes across even more clearly in the descriptive accounts of Spartiate life in Xenophon’s Hellenika. In his account of the conspiracy of Kinadon, the latter is portrayed as taking a potential recruit on a tour of Sparta and its environs. In the agora they found the king, ephors, members of the gerousia and about 40 other Spartiates, amidst a large crowd of over 4,000 non-Spartiates. Walking around the streets, they came across Spartiates in ones and twos, amongst a larger number of non-citizens. Finally, on each of the Spartiates’ country estates they observed a single master amidst a mass of other persons, presumably helot labourers (3.3.5). In describing Spartiate reactions to news of the defeat at Leuktra in 371, Xenophon records the relatives of the dead going about in public, bright and cheerful, whereas few relatives of the survivors were to be seen (6.4.16). In these episodes Xenophon depicts Spartiates independently going about their daily lives—or stopping at home—following personal schedules apparently focused on their private affairs.
A similar impression is given in his account of the prosecution of the errant commander Sphodrias (Hodkinson 2007). Xenophon depicts King Agesilaos’ daily early morning bathe in the River Eurotas, where he was approached by a number of petitioners: Spartiates, foreigners and servants (5.4.28). Later, he depicts the concern of the associates of Sphodrias that his teenage son Kleonymos had received no recent visits from his lover, Archidamos, “whereas formerly they had seen him come often” (ibid. 29). Archidamos and Kleonymos have sufficient leisure time to pay and receive frequent visits; and Sphodrias’ associates have sufficient free time to keep a close eye on Kleonymos’ visitors. Far from the collective, state-controlled lifestyle of a military camp claimed by Plutarch, Xenophon’s evidence suggests that individual Spartiates lived their everyday lives intermingled with all the non- Spartiate groups living in Sparta; and that the polis did not attempt to micro- manage the details of its citizens’ daily life. 30 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches
One particular aspect of citizen life that Sparta abstained from micro- managing, according to recent scholarship, is their training for war. Modern textbooks often depict Spartiate life as primarily devoted to military training. The ground for a different approach was laid by Hans van Wees’ revisionist study, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004, 89–93), which argued that the training of all Greek hoplite armies before the fourth century was rudimentary and unspecialised, focused only on general fitness through standard Greek leisure pursuits such as athletics and the gymnasium. Van Wees saw Sparta as a partial (but only a partial) exception. However, my article, ‘Was classical Sparta a military society?’ (Hodkinson 2006, 133–41), has developed his general view further, arguing that in Sparta too training for warfare was conducted primarily through general leisure activities. As we have seen, Xenophon’s most direct reference to military training for adult Spartiates relates to participation in hunting, which was simply about physical fitness: “so that they should be able to stand the strain of campaigning no less than the young men” (Constitution 4.7).
There is no evidence that the Spartiates spent time on dedicated weapons training or combat practice. The only reference to specialised Spartiate military training is Xenophon’s description (Constitution 11) of the various drill manoeuvres of which the Lakedaimonian army was capable. Whether these required significant amounts of training, however, is open to doubt. They had to be performed not just by the Spartiates but also by the perioikoi, who were equally integral to the Lakedaimonian phalanx. Since most perioikoi were working farmers scattered around Sparta’s large territory, their opportunities to congregate for peace-time training must have been limited. Indeed, Xenophon implies that the drills could be learned with minimal training, describing them as “so easy to understand that anyone who can recognise another man cannot go wrong ... There is nothing remotely difficult to learn in this” (11.6). My argument on this point is part of a broader view that, despite Sparta’s effectiveness in war, martial organisation and values, though important, did not dominate over other aspects of civic or private life.
Overall, I have argued (Hodkinson 2009, 489–91), Sparta exhibited none of the features which characterise modern totalitarian regimes: a totalist ideology; a single mass party; the concentration of power in an unaccountable individual or small group irremovable by peaceful institutionalised means; a secret police scrutinising the lives of citizens; a monopoly over access to weapons and mass communications, and economic institutions with the capacity to create a centrally-planned economy.
Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 31
Instead, Spartan ideology accepted the legitimate existence of a private household sphere outside state control (Hodkinson 2009, 446–55; 2015). The clearest evidence is provided by Dionysios of Halikarnassos (20, excerpt 13.2). Contrasting Spartan practice with the intrusive scrutiny of private behaviour by the Roman censors, he states that the Spartans
permitted their oldest men to beat with their canes those citizens who were disorderly in any public place whatever; but as for what took place inside their homes, they neither worried about it nor kept watch over it, holding that each man’s house door marked the boundary within which he was free to live as he pleased.
Dionysios is a late source, from the first century BC; but the existence of a domestic domain exempt from official control is already mentioned in Plato’s Republic. The citizens in his timocratic polis, modelled on Sparta, “entrench themselves within the walls of their homes”, where “they can spend lavishly on their wives and anything else they choose” (VIII, 548a).
2.5 Role and status of women: marriage customs, land ownership, inheritance The exemption of the domestic sphere from state control had particular effects on the role and status of women, our understanding of which has been greatly advanced by recent research—though there are also significant controversies.
The distinctive marriage ceremony described by Plutarch (Lycurgus 15.3–4) —involving the groom’s secretive ritual seizure of the bride, dressed in a man’s cloak and shoes and with her head shaved—prevented families from indulging in the public display and exhibition of wealth often associated with wedding rituals in classical Athens, with their lavish clothing and feasting and the bride’s public procession to the groom’s house. However, recent research has highlighted how in other respects Spartiate marital customs nicely exemplify the family’s relative independence from state control, especially as regards the marriage of women (Hodkinson 2009, 436–42). The marital arrangements of women were far less constrained than those of men (Hodkinson 1989, 90–3 & 109–10). Men were limited to one wife at a time: the case of King Anaxandridas II and his two wives, as Herodotus himself says (5.39–40), was the exception that proved the rule. In contrast, a woman could legally have two partners through a wife-sharing/man-doubling arrangement (Xenophon, Constitution 1.8–9) or multiple husbands through a polyandrous marriage (Polybius 12.6b.8). In addition, the legal obligation to marry and have children applied only to Spartiate men. According to 32 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches
Xenophon (Constitution 9.5), the coward had to pay a fine for being unable to marry, whereas his unmarried womenfolk suffered only social disadvantage.
Indeed, the marital arrangements Spartiate families made for their womenfolk were less constrained by state regulation than at Athens or at Gortyn on Crete, the only other poleis for which we possess detailed evidence (Hodkinson 2009, 436–41). Take, for example, the marriage of heiresses: that is, daughters without surviving brothers. At Athens and Gortyn, when a man died without sons, his nearest kinsman had the right to marry his surviving daughter, regardless of any arrangements her father had made—unless she was married and already had a son (at Athens) or child of either sex (at Gortyn). At both Athens and Gortyn there were also compulsory rules defining the order of precedence of different eligible kinsmen. In Sparta the deceased father’s pre-arrangements had greater force. An heiress already married (whether she had children or not), or even merely betrothed by her father, retained her existing or intended spouse (Herodotus 6.57.4; Aristotle, Politics II, 1270a26–29). Only in the case of an unbetrothed heiress did the father’s nearest kinsman have the right to marry her. If he did not wish to do so, there was no compulsory order of precedence of eligible kinsmen: she could be married to any citizen. In short, Athens and Gortyn intervened to ensure that families married their heiresses within the kin group; Sparta left this up to families themselves.
This flexibility in female marital arrangements was important because women were major owners of property, controlling nearly two-fifths of the land, according to Aristotle (Politics II, 1270a23–5). The precise legal means through which women acquired so much land is debated. Aristotle ascribes it to a combination of inheritances acquired by heiresses and large landed dowries given to girls with brothers. However, I have argued (Hodkinson 1986, 398–404; 2000, 98–103) that Aristotle, who uses the Athenian rather than the authentic Spartan terms for heiresses and dowries, partly misunderstands the Spartan situation. In my view, the landed dowries given to girls with brothers were not merely voluntary parental gifts to a daughter on marriage, but a pre-mortem anticipation of the daughter’s rightful share of the inheritance. In families with both sons and daughters, each girl would legally inherit half the amount of landed property inherited by each boy—a system firmly attested at Gortyn. For example, in a family with two boys and two girls, each boy inherited one-third of the property, each girl one-sixth. I have described this system as “universal female inheritance” (Hodkinson 1989, 82), in that all women gained some inheritance, either as full heiresses or through sharing the property with their brothers. One advantage of my Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 33 view is that it provides the only explanation suggested to date of Aristotle’s figure of two-fifths for the amount of land in female hands. It can be shown mathematically that, even under different demographic parameters, my suggested system of universal female inheritance invariably produces female landownership at nearly 40%, precisely as Aristotle indicates.
One important debate arising from the considerable property rights of Spartiate women is whether it led to an exceptional degree of female empowerment. Sarah Pomeroy’s Spartan Women (2002) offers an extremely optimistic view, portraying female Spartiates as liberated, vocal and articulate, not only exercising freedom of sexual expression and control over their reproductive capacities, but also enforcing societal norms, wielding the power of life and death over their adult sons and even controlling the testing of male babies. Some of this has been accepted by other scholars. Thomas Figueira (2010) has shown that there was some genuinely significant female policing of masculine behaviour. Overall, however, Pomeroy’s book has been panned by reviewers for its inadequate source criticism, its anachronistic images of modern Western-style liberated ‘girl-power’, and its omission of the roles of older women.
In contrast to Pomeroy’s views stand several mutually complementary alternative approaches. One is the source-contextualised research of Ellen Millender (1999), which shows how fifth-century Athenian writers constructed an image of Sparta as an upside-down world in which licentious women dominated over their effeminate men. Another approach is found in my own work (Hodkinson 2004), which argues that, although their property and inheritance rights gave some wealthy Spartiate women considerable importance, they also brought constraints for many women, making them valuable commodities whose marriages were deployed for forging dynastic alliances or concentrating family property. A third approach views Spartiate women’s unusual comportment and extra-household activities in the context of their expected roles within the ideology of the Spartan polis. This approach is the enduring strength of Paul Cartledge’s classic article, ‘Spartan wives: liberation or license?’ (1981/2001/2002) and has been further developed in Figueira’s sophisticated recent study. As Figueira himself concludes, “Spartan women were not sexually liberated per se, but culturally conditioned to make certain choices that substantively affected men as well as themselves” (2010, 283).
The ambiguous position of prominent Spartiate women is nicely illustrated by one exceptional example: Kyniska, sister of King Agesilaos II (Hodkinson 2000, 319–29). Kyniska was the first Greek woman to win the Olympic four- 34 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches horse chariot-race, gaining two victories in 396 and 392 BC. (Like male Spartiate Olympic victors, she owned the chariot team, but did not drive the chariot.) She celebrated her successes with a costly and magnificent monument containing no fewer than seven bronze figures—Kyniska herself, her driver, her chariot and her four horses—sculpted by the famous foreign sculptor Apelles of Megara (Pausanias, Description of Greece 6.1.6). Her monument outdid in its grandeur any previous victory monument by male Olympic victors. Part of its marble base survives in the Olympia Museum and bears a boastful victory epigram which became celebrated in ancient anthologies (Inscriptiones Graecae V.1.1564a; Palatine Anthology 13.16):
Kings of Sparta are my father and brothers. Kyniska, conquering with a chariot of quick-footed horses, set up this statue. And I declare myself the only woman in all Hellas to have gained this crown.
Through use of her wealth Kyniska gained panhellenic fame: she even received a hero-shrine back home in Sparta (Pausanias 3.15.1). But she introduces herself through her male relatives. Indeed, Xenophon (Agesilaos 9.6) claims that she bred her teams of chariot horses only at the behest of her brother King Agesilaos II, who wanted to discredit the successes of male chariot victors as an unmanly achievement dependent solely on wealth. Xenophon may be underplaying Kyniska’s personal initiative; but her unparalleled female success and prominence certainly advanced the interests of her male kin, whilst implicitly criticising the ‘unmanly’ behaviour of other wealthy Spartiates. Kyniska perfectly symbolises the complex position and roles of Spartiate women revealed by recent research.
3. Modern receptions and the graphic novel Three The length of the bibliography at the end of my article is a sign that, while new academic approaches have developed apace over the last generation, there currently exists no complete synthesis aimed at a broader extra- academic audience. The nearest is Kennell 2010. This gap will soon be partly filled by the forthcoming two-volume Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sparta, edited by Anton Powell, projected for publication in 2015.
Besides Spartan antiquity, the Companion will also cover modern receptions of Sparta: the multiple ways in which Sparta has been appropriated and used in modern politics and culture. This has been another major growth area in recent research and, although it is not a formal part of the NSW HSC syllabus, it can provide an attractive way to help engage students with Sparta and show its continuing relevance. Ancient History 41–44 2011–2014 35
The classic study of this subject remains Elizabeth Rawson’s ground- breaking The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969). It is unlikely that any single scholar will ever match the full geographical breadth and chronological depth of her magisterial survey. However, recent research has produced several significant advances in understanding, captured in the nearest replacement for Rawson, the collective volume Sparta in Modern Thought (Hodkinson and Macgregor Morris eds 2012), produced as part of my project ‘Sparta in Comparative Perspective, Ancient to Modern’.
Recent work has brought out clearly the major shift in modern thinking that took place around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, in the wake of the French and American revolutions, when Sparta’s role in the early modern and Enlightenment periods as a largely positive model ancient community was decisively replaced by its relegation within liberal thought to the negative image of a backward, authoritarian and militarised state (Murray 2007; the essays by Mason, Winston and Christesen in Hodkinson and Macgregor Morris eds 2012, chs 3–5).
It has also highlighted how these negative images were intensified during the 20th century by Sparta’s close association in Western thinking with the totalitarian and militaristic regimes of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union—an association magnified by the way that racialist and militarist conceptions of ancient Sparta were enthusiastically promoted by National Socialist ideologues and politicians who saw Sparta as a forerunner of the Nazi racial state (Hodkinson 2010; the essays by Losemann, Roche and Hodkinson in Hodkinson and Macgregor Morris 2012, chs 7–9). On this subject, note especially Helen Roche’s Sparta’s German Children (2013), a detailed examination of how Sparta’s use as an educational ideal within the National Socialist elite schools, the Napolas, developed out of its similar usage in the Royal Prussian Cadet Schools before World War I. One remarkable feature of Roche’s research is the personal testimonies she was able to obtain from former Napola pupils—now old men in their 80s—about the Spartans’ use as a role model in their secondary education (chs 8–9).
Finally, recent research has foregrounded a phenomenon still only in its infancy—and not considered a worthy subject of academic study—when Rawson wrote in 1969. I refer here to the significant role of Sparta in contemporary popular mass culture: in novels, TV, films and even on YouTube (cf. the essays by Fotheringham and Nisbet in Hodkinson and Macgregor Morris 2012, chs 10–11). One issue of particular concern to academics regarding popular media productions of the ancient world is the question of authenticity—especially important when such productions reach 36 Hodkinson: Transforming Sparta: New Approaches mass audiences far exceeding the reach of older receptions. The concern for authenticity, along with growing pressures on scholars, especially in the UK, to communicate their research and generate ‘impact’ outside the academy,12 has led academics themselves to become pro-actively involved in the creation of popular receptions of antiquity.
One recent Spartan example, in which I myself have had the privilege to be involved, is the graphic novel Three (2014) by the renowned comics author Kieron Gillen: a fictional tale of three fugitive Lakonian helots who make their own personal stand against their Spartan oppressors. Three’s title purposely evokes the mythologised Sparta of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 (1999), the source of Zack Snyder’s 2006 film. However, in place of Miller’s glorification of the Spartiates’ role at Thermopylae as defenders of Greek and Western freedom, Gillen’s aim is a more subaltern depiction, focusing on an important element neglected by Miller: Sparta’s exploitation of the helots and the latter’s capacity for subversive agency.
As part of this alternative depiction, Three is set, not at the apogee of Sparta’s power, but in 364 BC, during the period of its crisis and decline not long after the battle of Leuktra and the liberation of Messenia. Although the story’s fictional date of 364 BC lies a few years after the terminal date of the NSW HSC ‘Spartan society’ option, almost all the key aspects of Spartan society covered in the novel all long pre-dated Leuktra. Moreover, at several points both Spartiates and helots look back, through story-telling sequences, to historical events earlier in the Classical period.
One useful feature of Three as a teaching aid is that, though telling a fictional story, it places a high value on historical authenticity. Gillen undertook extensive personal research into both primary sources and modern Spartan scholarship; and throughout the production process he engaged in detailed dialogue with myself as his historical consultant and with other colleagues from the University of Nottingham’s Department of Classics and its Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies. I was able to provide detailed comments on the historical authenticity of both the draft text and the proposed images.13 Balancing historical authenticity with the legitimate
12 Research impact beyond the academy was one of the criteria of assessment in the recent UK research assessment exercise (the so-called ‘Research Excellence Framework 2014’), counting for 20% of each unit’s grading. 13 A four-part blog about our collaboration from a panel discussion at the UK Classical Association’s 2014 conference, preceded by a blog from a public session at the Thought Bubble 2014 comics convention, can be viewed at
Three’s other useful feature for teaching purposes is that, though the fugitive helots take centre stage, the novel also views the story’s events from the Spartiates’ perspective. Hence it covers not only helot life, but also many facets of Spartiate society and values relevant to the ‘Spartan society’ option. These include a significant cameo appearance by a wealthy Spartiate woman, owner of an expensive team of chariot horses: a striking contribution from recent research. Gender issues also appear among the helot fugitives through the female character Damar, whose interaction with her male companions forms an important part of the story’s development.
Elizabeth Rawson concluded her 1969 study with the prescient prediction that “the history of the Spartan tradition … has surely not come to an end”. The recent resurgence of Sparta in academic research and popular culture suggests that we should expect it to continue well into the 21st century.
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